The Box - Marc Levinson [18]
Labor militancy was a natural outgrowth of the dockworkers’ situation. Longshoremen around the world fully understood that their well-being depended on collective action, because otherwise the large supply of men desperate to do manual labor would force wages to near-starvation levels. Their employers, in most cases, were not ship lines and terminal operators with assets and reputations to protect, but contractors hired to service a particular dock or a particular ship. This system allowed shipowners to evade responsibility for working conditions by claiming that not they but their contractors were in charge of dock labor. The lack of central authority on the management side was frequently mirrored on the union side. With no routine methods of resolving employment disputes, and with competing unions trying to prove their aggressiveness but often unable to impose settlements on their own members, strikes were frequent. A single grievance could bring an entire port to a standstill. An eleven-nation study found that dockworkers, along with miners and seafarers, lost more workdays to labor disputes than any other professions. In Britain alone, dock strikes resulted in the loss of nearly 1 million man-days of labor from 1948 through 1951 and another 1.3 million in 1954. Dockworkers proudly represented the leading edge of labor radicalism.18
Solidarity was strengthened by the lessons of history. Longshore unions’ power had waxed and waned in industrialized countries since the middle of the nineteenth century, and periods of union weakness inevitably brought heavier workloads and lower wages. After defeating a tumultuous strike in 1928, Australian dock operators slashed weekend pay and began hiring for half-day shifts, eliminating the single shift that had been a key union achievement. Across the United States, where the right to collective bargaining was not secured in law, shipping and stevedoring companies set out to break dock unions in the years after World War I and largely succeeded. Longshore wages in New Orleans fell from eighty cents an hour to forty cents after employers defeated the unions in 1923. West Coast employers rousted longshore unions in every port from Seattle to San Diego between 1919 and 1924 and then imposed lower wages and higher workloads. Demands for double shifts were common, and some ports tried to speed up loading by putting workers on piecework rather than hourly pay. After employers crushed the unions in Marseilles in 1950, “[i]t was a job with no rules,” remembered French docker Alfred Pacini. Nothing speaks more eloquently to the traditional status of longshoremen than Edinburgh dockers’ recollection of the greatest improvement after creation of the National Dock Labor Board in 1947: construction of an “amenity block” with individual lockers and showers, neither of which private employers had ever seen fit to provide.19
This history of antagonistic labor-management relations gave rise to two problems that plagued the shipping industry around the world. One was theft. Theft had always been a problem on the waterfront, and the growth of trade in higher-value products after World War II caused it to reach epidemic proportions. Some longshoremen justified thievery as a response to deteriorating economic conditions, but it remained a problem even where union contracts or government intervention had led to better wages: a British joke from the 1960s concerned a docker who was caught stealing a bar of gold and punished by having its value deducted from his next pay. “It wis the pilferin’ that upset me,” recalled a Scottish longshoreman of the 1950s. “It was terrible, terrible, terrible.” Longshoremen prided themselves on such arcane skills as the ability to tap whiskey from a sealed cask supposedly stowed safely in a ship’s hold. In Portland, small objects such as transistor radios and bottled liquor were usually stolen for personal use by family and friends, but not for sale. No such limits were